It took more than one experience to bring me out of my deep spiritual darkness, kind of like when a sculptor has to first knock off huge chunks of rock from a bolder before he can begin to make it look like a statue.
Maybe a week or so after I had my experience with Lucifer and the white moths, here in Austin, I was in my tiny apartment. And in torment. Indecision or what the Bible calls “double mindedness” can kill you. “A double minded man is unstable in all his ways”, (James 1:8). That was really how I was.
I’d gotten a Bible from my parents and also taken some time to really apologize to them for the hurt I’d caused them over the last few years. We weren’t close but at least this was the beginning of a long term reconciliation. But I was very far from the person that God would have me to be.
In fact, as so often happened, I was going back to my old thought patterns of unbelief and skepticism. Things like, “That didn’t really happen! That was all in your mind! You just imagined all that, just stray thoughts bouncing around inside your brain!” That’s what I’d always thought before and now that I was “back to normal”; that was still my default mode of thought on all these things.
But then another series of thoughts were there. “It sure did seem real. It was more real than what I am experiencing right now. And it wasn’t really the first time because you’ve had a lot of experiences that are unexplainable unless there is some kind of spiritual world.”
So I was lying in my bed in the middle of the night, just tormented between these two worlds of thought. And I was desperate. I’d been reading the Bible every day, for hours. I was getting very little out of it because there was so much I didn’t understand. I was reading from Genesis to Exodus and on through it like that, heavy going.
Finally I’d just had enough. I got up out of bed, in my pitch black room, clasped my bible to my chest and said this prayer to God:
“God, if you are really there, you have to be bigger than my mind. You have to be stronger than me and my mind. And I am not going to do anything till you show me if you are there.”
Then in the total darkness I started trying to just shut down every single movement of my body, twitches, trembles, just any movement that would distract me from completely and utterly bringing my prayer to God, if He was actually there.
And alone in darkness at what hour of the night I didn’t know, suddenly my clock radio on my refrigerator came on.
I certainly hadn’t set it to come on at what was around 3 in the morning. But just at that moment when I was the most desperate to have some kind of answer from God, the radio came on. And maybe you know this song that was playing right then because it was popular at that time,
“Lift up your fellow man, lend him a helping hand, put a little love in your heart.
You see it’s getting late, oh please don’t hesitate; put a little love in your heart.
And the world will be a better place, and the world will be a better place for you and me, just wait and see.”
Now maybe you’re an atheist and say right now, “Oh that was just an accident, just a coincidence.” At 3 AM my radio came on when I surly didn’t set it at that time. It came on right at the moment of my greatest desperation to have some kind of answer from God to overcome the domination my mind had on me. And on top of it all, an extremely significant song was on the radio right at that moment. You can call it a coincidence if you want to but I’d had things like this, although not this stunning, happen to me before.
I fell to the floor on my knees, overcome by that experience and the amazing answer to prayer. As I’ve shared in another post, it was for me almost like what happened to Jody Foster in the movie “Contact” when she first heard signals from outer space. Just indescribable amazement.
But there was more. As I was there in the darkness on my knees, I heard clearly two voices, with words I don’t think I’ll ever forget and which fundamentally spoke to my greatest weakness and changed my life. That story is going to be my next blog post, “Don’t ever ask again.“
You cannot “prove” God (or His voice or personal message to you) to unbelievers. I still experience things in answer to prayer that I know are direct answers to my prayers, but others explain these miracles away. Just recently, my son wanted to be signed up for a German course, but in the Berlitz school they told us the course was full and he would have to wait till the next one — 2 months! We went anyway to sign him up ( remember, we had prayed). Again, at the school, the man who was talking to us, said we shouldn´t get our hopes up, since there were two more on the waiting list, in case someone should cancel their participation in the course. Right there another lady working on another desk turned around and said: “You need a place for the 5th of August? Someone cancelled right now.” And — lo and behold — they signed my son into the course right there and then, even though 2 others were on the waiting list before him. Yes, you can explain it away….but I believe in miracles orchestered by God for is children (because He loves us!) I know I didn´t choose Him, but He chose me. I wasn´t even looking for Him when He called me 33 years ago — but there He was, in my darkest hour, and pulled me out of the mud and changed my life forever.
You’re right. You can’t prove God to people. But we can and should share with others the things we have experienced. Some of the seed will fall on hard ground. But some may fall on good ground who will receive the truth we’re sharing with them and their lives can be changed, like ours have been. Thanks for telling about this little miracle of answered prayer for you and your son, GBY!
Even if I had NEVER had a prayer answered or NEVER heard a voice directing me from danger which was unknown to me at the time or NEVER had help from “beings” who only afterward I would realize were angels in earthly form, simply the number of VERY close calls and near misses to life and death situations that just “happened” NOT to have happened point to some sort of extraterrestrial “devine” -if you will- protection that was at work in my life and that even BEFORE I believed in ANYTHING. Only BEFORE, I didn’t WANT to see it so I just sort of wrote it all off as.. well.. you know.. just stuff that happened.
It’s like that verse, “blessed are your eyes for they see”. Somehow the Lord gives us the spiritual blessing of being able to realize in our minds and hearts that there’s something otherworldly going on. And from that realization, we are led forward by Him into His Word and His Ways and to the life we have now. We’re most richly blessed.
Great blog, Mark! Very edifying! God’s blessing on you and your witness!
Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of GOD! Romans 10:17. “When you seek ME you will find ME, when you seek ME with all your heart!” GOD has given to every man (person) a measure of faith. Evidence that GOD exist, When you look at all the civilizations of the world, even the most remotest tribes, in the modest remotest locations, they all have some sort of deity that they worship. Because GOD has created in us as sinful human beings a GOD shaped hole. We try to fill it with many things. But only HE can truly fill it. To observe the whole of nature, the macrocosm and the microcosm, and the order that exist in it all is proof that GOD exist. Because it takes more faith to believe that the order that we see around us just happened by chance. I like to point skeptics and atheist to those who were in the same boat, but did their research, such as C S Lewis, Josh McDowell, and Lee Strobel. Each of these men were atheist, who set out to see if there was really any proof to the claims of Christianity. The evidence that each of them discovered from the various fields of science, history, and mathematics was so overwhelming that they became believers. And each of them have written extensively about it. Check out the writings of these three men and what they discovered through their search. JESUS said in the gospel of Matthew,”Ask and you will receive, Seek and you will find, Knock and the door will be opened, everyone who ask will receive, he that seeks will find and everyone that knocks the door will be opened.
Yes..even before I believed, God saved my life several times, knowing that He would need me and use me later in life. We certainly have no need to worry about the future either.
That was most definitely a deep spiritual experience and a direct intervention from the Almigty in response to your prayer GBY KGFG